The feds being involved in the ows dismantling is very disturbing

[xiamiam]

How can this be legal? We're not talking about hooligan criminals or terrorists. We're talking about us. This move has kicked it up a notch or two.. we do have recourse, don't we? How is this legal?

[brooklynite]

1. First: where's the evidence that it happened?

I've seen ONE author cite ONE anonymous source. I'll wait and see if harder evidence appears.

Assuming it did happen, what exactly is the legal provision that has been violated? At least in NYC, the Courts have ruled that preventing camping and sleeping doesn't violate the protestors First Amendment rights as long as they're allowed in the same space for protests, meetings, etc.

[Fumesucker]

2. Hmm.. That ruling was *after* they changed judges for no apparent reason.. n/t

[brooklynite]

3. They changed Judges for a very good reason...

...the Judge who issues a temporary restraining order doesn't automatically become the judge of the hearing. Otherwise the plaintiff could engage in "judge shopping". At least in NYC, Judges are assigned randomly from a pool of Judges who work in the relevant subject area.

[Fumesucker]

4. I suppose that's why they left the sympathetic judge out of the pool.. n/t

[Freddie Stubbs]

5. She was left out of the pool because she didn't specialize in that type of law

[Fumesucker]

6. Perhaps you can explain why the airspace over lower Manhattan was closed? n/t

[brooklynite]

10. No, but why is this relevant to the allegation of Federal involvement?

I have never said I supported the Police Dept's tactics. I have said that the local Police have the responsibility of enforcing local laws (health, fire safety, disrupting traffic, etc.), regardless of whether the State or Federal authorities are enforcing theirs.

[Fumesucker]

14. Local police control airspace?

I've been looking and can't find a definitive answer, I'm under the impression that the FAA is somehow part of airspace control.

That's FEDERAL Aviation Administration.

[brooklynite]

16. I believe FAA controls airspace above 1,000 feet.

[Fumesucker]

21. So you're saying the news choppers could have stayed above 1000 feet?

I guess those telephoto lenses won't show anything that far away so they just decided to call it a night anyway, why waste fuel for nothing.

[Freddie Stubbs]

29. Probably wanted to avoid collisions between news helicopters

[Fumesucker]

31. The twisting dismount was killer..

I give you an 9.2..

:yourock:

[Hell Hath No Fury]

34. I was at a Occupy SF when they were going to get raided ---

MULTIPLE choppers overhead in a small area, for more than an hour. That's what air traffic control is for -- to make sure they don't hit each other. Duh.

You're excuse is startlingly lame.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

40. Cool story bro!

:thumbsup:

[hootinholler]

32. Is that why they were able to *ignore* the first TRO? n/t

[EFerrari]

30. Aside from the same tactics being used all over the country

like attacking after dark, hiding police ID, the propagation of memes, denying access to the press, can you tell me who shut down the air space over New York?

[bigtree]

48. NYPD did

read the articles . . . NYPD helicopters forced news choppers down and away from the area.

[EFerrari]

52. When did the FAA cede their jurisdiction to NYPD?

I missed that.

[bigtree]

55. hey, you're the one telling me to read

. . . the only ones cited in the reports controlling airspace during the evictions were NYPD helicopters. Show me where there's anything other than speculation that the FAA directed those NYPD helicopters.

[EFerrari]

60. The bigger frame is that the FAA controls airspace, not localities.

So, the FAA doesn't need to fly the helicopters. But they do need to give permission to shut the airspace down.

[sabrina 1]

50. The 'courts' in NY did not rule that way. The first ruling was in

favor of the protesters who received a restraining order against the police. The Mayor and his Police Commissioner, who DOES work with the FBI as we know, ignored, possibly illegally, that ruling and refused to respect the judge's order and the restraining order.

They then shopped around for another judge and illegally kept the protesters out of the park while they did so. It may be that the order they got will be challenged as illegal, according to one of the attorneys who handled the case.

In Nashville and Cleveland, the protesters prevailed in court also. And in Santa Rosa, the City Council acknowledged without going to court, their right to be there.

The legal provision in question, and ruled on favorably at least twice now by different courts, is that the Authorities are wrong to call what they are doing 'camping out'. That when tents are used in a 1st Amendment case, they are not 'camping', they are acting under the umbrella of the 1st Amendment and therefore the local ordinances do not apply.

Now I hope the protesters begin to 'occupy the courts' all over the country. With lawsuits for the brutal attacks that have left many of them injured, for teh expensive equipment these thugs that are supposed to represent the people but clearly do not, destroyed, and to restore the rights this president was supposed to start doing when we elected him.

[bigtree]

7. someone better provide some more proof of that

other than that one unnamed source cited in the rw rag before we get hysterical

[xiamiam]

9. sf examiner is not what i would consider a rw rag..nt

[bigtree]

11. I think it's articles are trite and biased

The articles it uses to balance its right wing gibberish remind me of the 'democrats' on FOX News.

[jberryhill]

22. please provide a link to the SF Examiner carrying this story

The right wing site "The Examiner" runs examiner.com. It is not the SF Examiner.

You are confused.

[xiamiam]

25. yes, you are right..nt

[emulatorloo]

20. I agree with you. Why can't DU be fact based? Driven today by rumor and speculation.

[bigtree]

23. driven by folks own demons

The premise behind the protests is that government is colluding with WS to the point where it can't be trusted. It's not the softened version our democratic pols would like to interpret it as. There is barely a line between the avarice directed by protestors and supporters at WS and their adversarial stance against the WH. The rush to judgement is driven by a desire for actual proof of their view that the President is conspiring against them, even as he expresses as much support for the movement as he believes is politically wise. I can't imagine that he's not aware of how thin that line is.

[EFerrari]

33. You are mistaken and have obviously not been watching or listening

to the occupations. Obama rarely is even mentioned. Go watch the livestream and read the chats. He isn't a topic of converastion.

And it wasn't my demons that spent millions of dollars developing fusion centers or "Secure communities". That was our tax money.

[bigtree]

39. depends on where you are

and who you're talking to

[EFerrari]

42. I've been watching Denver, NY, Oakland, San Francisco

Cal, Rochester, Chicago. It doesn't really seem to depend on where you are. Overall, Obama is not on anyone's top ten.

[Avalux]

8. Patriot Act. They can do whatever they want to us, Constitution be damned. n/t

[Wind Dancer]

12. Bingo!

You nailed it.

[xiamiam]

15. even more disturbing..although I can't see a good argument against civil disobedience

and /or trying to equate it with terrorism

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

13. Not to worry. Obama will fire and bring charges against any federal officeal involved.

I mean, he said he "supports" OWS, didn't he?

[TBF]

27. ...

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[lumberjack_jeff]

17. Citizens are defined by the shit they put up with. n/t

[Kahuna]

18. Do the Feds know who "us" is? How would they know that? Could be

the locals cited a terror threat that required the FEDs to participate.

[emulatorloo]

19. The "feds being involved" is a DU rumor/speculation. Can we stop treating rumor as fact?

[xiamiam]

24. its not just du..its all over the net..i would prefer that it be a rumor

and that this was just a bunch of mayors on several conference calls. That's bad enough but..since it is all over the internet, does it stand to reason that the feds would deny it if it were not true?..

[emulatorloo]

28. "it must be true, I read it on the Internet."

[EFerrari]

35. DHS was at the little BART protests that happened before #OWS.

Do you seriously believe they won't try to influence this? Their view is that the planet is a battlefield.

It's fine to want more evidence. That's just sensible. But ridiculing people for raising the question of Federal collusion itself lacks common sense.

[emulatorloo]

38. I am not ridiculing anybody. Everything I have read on this is self-reflexive.

Everything refers back to a single source, which only contains speculation and anonymous quotes.

Just because the same " story" is repeated over and over and over again does not make it true. That is the mistake wing nuts make when all of their crazy sites repeat and amplify the same piece of propaganda.

I admit that I am getting testy, but there are many many threads here today claiming that speculation is fact.

[EFerrari]

44. But there are things we know we know.

We know the FBI tracks protest groups. We've seen DHS at protests. We've seen the same tactics being used by mayors all over the country that include abusing the press, violently attacking peaceful protesters and destroying their property under cover of night -- without a word from Holder. We've seen air space shut down over NYC. None of that is speculation but observation.

We are not making the same mistake that wing nuts make when they say Obama is a Nazi leading us into socialism.

It's possible that people are overstating what they know but in the absence of a statement from Holder, silence does appear to be consent. We need more information and I suspect we will get it sooner than later.

And when we find out the scope of federal involvement, our first concern will not be, and should not be, how it impacts Mr. Obama's re-election.

[bigtree]

45. do you hear yourself?

you've made your conclusion already, based on hearsay, innuendo, and loose associations with other protests. Everything you've seen or heard leads you to your own conclusion. There's no apparent limit in your scope of charges, all based what amounts to not much more than speculation and guessing based on a yet uncorroborated source (federal official?), cited in a remarkably sparsely detailed article which itself reads like guesswork and prejudgment.

I think we should wait to get some more ground under this report before we take it to the moon and back.

[EFerrari]

51. Can you read?

I made no charges and I drew no conclusion except that we will learn more shortly.

Take your own advice, bigtree.

[bigtree]

53. "silence does appear to be consent?"

"And when we find out the scope of federal involvement . . ."

[EFerrari]

58. "Appears to be" is not a conclusion but an acknowledgment of uncertainty

and the scope of federal involvement could be zero. I'm being much more careful than you seem to realize.

[sabrina 1]

54. The attacks were coordinated, among 40 Police Depts

the AP has confirmed. Why? Why is each city not dealing with their own issues?

And why are they sending out such huge forces to attack a few hundred protesters? Why in some cases, as in Chaple Hill, the heavy weapons? Are the people now the enemy of the Government?

We KNOW that is how the Bush administration viewed anyone who was not a loyal supporter, but he is gone.

Ray Kelly, the NYPD Commissioner, works with the FBI regularly. Why is it so hard to believe that all this 'coordination' was not being organized by a central source?

Even before Quan dropped the info about the Conference call, or before the report on the coordination with the Feds, people noticed the military-style nature of the raids and simply assumed this was coordinated, and now we know it was.

[bigtree]

56. mayors collaborate all the time. not so sinister

not surprising at all that they'd seek each others counsel. Not surprising at all that they'd also seek outside advice.

And citing AP is funny. You need as much corroboration on their collaborations as the first unnamed source that set all of DU atwitter.

[sabrina 1]

59. Well, it's clear you want to believe what you want to believe.

Unfortunately the facts are that neither the FBI, the DHS or the 40 Police Depts who coordinated their attacks on peaceful protesters, have responded to the requests for either a denial or confirmation of the allegations made by several news sources now.

According to the president, eg, decisions were to be left to the local authorities, but with mayor Quan's confirmation (is the BBC also unreliable now?)of a coordinated attack, plus a coordinated 'message' about the occupiers, it seems that the local authorities are either incapable of making their own decisions, or some other entity is driving these attacks against the American people.

Then there is the statement from the organizer of the other movement in DC that he was told by a cop with whom they have a good relationship that the 'orders are coming from a Federal level'. I expect to see this decent man also smeared but that doesn't change the fact that these reports of coordination are increasing.

All the FBI and the DHS and the 40 Police Depts have to do is to deny the reports, which have now been broadcast on Television, but here and in the foreign media. So it's not like they don't know what they are accused of.

I will to hear those denials. But not holding my breath.

[xiamiam]

36. better source of info than tv news..which i NEVER watch

why not respond to my question ..do you not think the feds would end this if they were not involved just by issuing a statement?

[emulatorloo]

41. The Feds would not respond for the same reason you would not respond to someone

Who asked you 'When did you stop beating your spouse."

The Internet reports are just as speculative and baseless.

[sabrina 1]

61. Have the Feds denied this 'DU Rumor' yet?

Considering the 'rumor' has made it to the other side of the ocean, and to US Television, and that they have been asked to confirm or deny these 'rumors' you would think by now, they would have done the most obvious thing, deny they had any part in this coordinated attack on the American People.

It's really simple, just deny the involvement of the Feds.

[TBF]

26. Did anyone really think they wouldn't use the Patriot Act against us?

It is the 1% that defines "terrorism" - it can be whatever they want it to be. This is what we're up against.

UNITING AND STRENGTHENING AMERICA BY
PROVIDING APPROPRIATE TOOLS REQUIRED
TO INTERCEPT AND OBSTRUCT TERRORISM
(USA PATRIOT ACT) ACT OF 2001

http://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/patriot_text.pdf

[blindpig]

37. It was, imho, the primary purpose.

Don't take no abacus to figure that capitalism would have another crisis and where the weight of it would fall, too predictable.

[nadinbrzezinski]

43. No it is not

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2321818

The dynamic is like predictable...

[vcc]

46. even if thats true, & we don't know for sure...

...I don't see why that is so terrible. And I am a strong supporter of what OWS stands for, at least as I understand it to be. Fact is, it is a national movement, so some national monitoring of and communication about the situation between officials is understandable and inevitable. "We're not talking about hooligan criminals or terrorists." I'd love to think not, but who knows? There are plenty of very destructive groups that would love to latch onto OWS and use it for their own purposes and maybe they already have started to and that's what the evictions may be trying to break up or prevent? We just don't know everything. So, ummm, am I in some kind of insane minority here for not rushing to judgement on this til we find out more info and not automatically calling everybody in our government fascists?

[FiveGoodMen]

62. You won't fool anyone.

[spanone]

47. jumping da shark

[Citizen Worker]

49. Why is it so difficult for people to accept the fact that Obama is a defender of the status quo and

fierce advocate for the 1%? That's who is and always has been. Nothing new here.

[Fire Walk With Me]

57. The government is owned by the rich, who wish to destroy the movement. Period.

Notice that the new Italian PM was once a Goldman Sachs advisor? They've destroyed economies to create the opportunity to install their own people. They did it with Arnold Schwarzennegar (sp), they're doing it here!